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THtr HIDDtrN
SHAKtrSPtrARtr
To William Shakespeare, working actor-playwright, the banning of books, the deleting of passages from a play by the censor, and the closing of theaters as a form of political reprisal were everyday problems.

1 IIENRY V t When Art lVas Tongue-tieil

bg Autlrority

His fellow Londoners were being exiled, imprisoned, maimed, and tortured for political dissent. There vvas an unpopular Irish war, open scheming for the succession, bitter factionalism at court. Shakespeare was in the middle of all this turmoil. Yet critics would have us believe that he remained the aloof Olympian, removed in interest from his world and its agonies.
Now Thomas H. fameson, in a challenging exposition of the plays of this petiod, demonstrates that Shakespeare was in fact a vigorous and open rebel against the new Tudor tyranny. The poet's critical commentary on his times is subtle and masked, but it is present-and probably was intelligible to his
contemporaries.

rlrip of books and play productions. It is no great wonder that trone of the plays Shakespeare produced in those years (exclusive ol comedies) contain what we are prone to think of as "whole"
I

ll is likely thal The Life of King Henry the Fifth was one of the plirys written by Shakespeare during a low period in his life, the t'r'rrr 1599. Things were much out of ioint in the years immediately proceding Elizabeth's death-court favorites fallen out of grace, rrrr rrnpopular Irish war, open scheming for the succession, censor-

rcloes or protagonists.

'l'he least whole of the lot by far is Harry Monmouth from Ilnwy V. Coming to this play fresh from reading the preceding llistories one may be forgiven for asking, "What on earth has happcned to Prince HalP'Who is this excessively passionate yet pious nrirn who sprang unheralded out of the Boar's Head Tavern in
i,irrstcheap to become the conqueror of France?

In uncovering Shakespeare's political dissent as set down in his plays, ]ameson has created an exciting and disturbing thesis that will fascinate both scholar and reader. ?he Hidden Shckespeare is an important contribution not only to textual analysis but to a better understanding of the true sources of greatness in our greatest dramatist.

so mix'd in him;il"; iiiJli*,S:11'""u "n And say to all the world, 'This was a mant'
Arry heroic past calls for such heroes, but the lines here quoted no more suit Harry Monmouth than they did Brutus, of whom tlrcy were spoken in luli,us Caesar, produced in the same year, 151)9. The huzzas, the gufiaws, the spine-tingling, throat-catching

MINRVA

PRSS

Cover design: Emil

Antonucci

l4C, 6

speeches

character about as ar?mix'd as can be found outside broadsides and cartoons. Critical fudgments of the play vary accordingly. There are those who cleim Harry as a paragon of Nature, others wfio write as if they oould not stomach his company. Perhaps
Shakespeare intonded this confusion.

that accomlnny Monmouth to F'rance do honor to a

venience in his professional life, or how should he feel? Should he ftght back, play safe, or pretend that it is of no consequence to him, he at least being one who is well intentioned? It all depends on the writer. Take Shakespeare. The one scholar, and an influ-

is rernarkablo that when every nook and cranny of Shakelife is ransecked for evidence of what sort of man he was, how he came to bo so educated, what his attitude toward his craft was, wh&t hc felt to bo his various responsibilities, no one has appeard btrt mtldly lnterested-to iudge from all the evidence I have readJn cpeculating about his feelings concerning censorshtp. How can such a thing be? Judging by our own mid-twentleth-oentury concenr for the subiect, censorship should have been tho domlnant interest in his professional life in the years when fellow Londoners were being exiled, maimed, tortured, and imprisonod. His latest history play, and the subject of this chapter, capped a series of plays all of which in one way or,another lie under susplclon of having been tampered w:ith by official censors. Henry V was composed in a veritable climate of censorship. In short, to William Shakespeare the banning of books, the deleting of passages from play-copy, the closing of theatres werc anything but matters of gossip and hearsay. How does a loyal subject feel who is subjected to such inconspeare's

It

ential one, who has concerned himself at length with Shakespeare's possible involvement with censors leaves us to draw the astonishing conclusion that Shakespeare may have sanctioned the intrusion and been grateful for it. Calling attention, some thirtyffve years ago, to the quantity of explosive matter contained in Part II of Henry fV, instead of posing the obvious question*how in the world did it ever get into the play in the ffrst place?-he published a companion essay protesting Shakespeare's total, consisten! and lifelong orthodoxy. It is a remarkable performance.l It seems, however, to have suited the taste of our times, for it in itself has become orthodoxy. It was but a few years ago that one
of our eminent Shakespearean scholars wrote an opinion of Shakespeare's conservatism that included approval of such things as the cold-blooded massacre of political dissidents.

What image of ShakesPeare, the writer, is being preserved here? The image of a mild man? A timorous one? Or of one who was simply fortunate enough to live unscathed by contemporary scandalJand oppressions-and, hence, could afford to be "above them"? But he oas scathed. His plays show it. Let us reread a certain scene fror,n 2 Henry IV, not on this occasion to show what

little difierence the deletions of a niggling censor make on the

work of a master, but how greatl The most prominent 'tebels" tn 2 Henry IV are a group of men whose chief and most pressing complaint-if the censor would but leave the play alone-is that they are not trusted. They cannot gain the ear of their king even to present their grievances. Granted that this is not the strongest reason for leading an army into the ffeld, let us overlook the impropriety for the moment and hear the Archbishop conffding in his rebel followers. He is answering the pessimistic obiections of his confederate Mowbray in a confergnce that followed their meeting with representatives of
the King
s
2

That, plucking to unffx an enemy, He doth unfasten so and shake a friend. So that this land, like an ofiensive wife, That hath enrag'd him on to ofier strokes, As he is striking, holds his infant up And hangs resolv'd correction in the arm That was uprear'd to execution.

(IV, i, L97-2r4)

A peculiarly domestic image we have here, of a wife venturing to remind an angry husband of their shared interests, but no more so

forces.

than the whole of this scene, that of the meeting of the Archbtshop and his confederates with the loyal leaders:

No, no, my lord. Note this; the King is weary Of dainty and such picking grievances: For ho hath found to end one doubt by death Revives two greater in the heirs of life; And therefore will he wipe his tables clean, And keep no tell-tale to his memory That may repeat and history his loss To new remembrance; for full well he knows He cannot so precisely weed this land
As his misdoubts present occasion: His foes are so enrooted with his friends

I take not on me here ds a physician, Nor do I as an enemy to peace Troop in the throngs of military men;
But rather show a while.like fearful war, To diet rank minds sick of happiness And purge the obstructions which begin to stop Our very veins of life. . . .

(tbid.,6M6)

There are thiry-ffve lines in all of the Archbishop's intended molligcation, only ten of which ever reached print in Shakespeare's

lifetime. f transcribe the ten, placing.asterisks to show where the deletion occ'urs. It is a feeble exoneration, and feeble it will appear in print:

a physician to cure a land ("Our doctors say this is no month to lrleed," Richard, lI, \ i, 157); gone the interesting allusion to minds sick of happiness; above all-for this is the crux of the matter-gone the complaints of the insurgents of being denied
access to the King's person. Ten lines alone rernain, lines sufficient

Wherefore do I this? so the question stands. Briefy to this end: we are all diseas'd;o * The dangers of the days but newly gone,Whose memoryis written on the earth

to establish the usual excuse of rebels that they are in the ffeld not to disturb peace but to secure it. The answer delivered by the

With yet appearing blood,-and the

examples

Of every minute's instance, present now, Have put us in these ill-beseeming arms; Not to break peace, or any branch of it, But to establish here a peace indeed, Concurring both in name and quality;

Ieader of the loyal forces, "Whenever yet was your appeal denied?"-though hardly an intelligible rebuttal in the absence of any reference to such appeals-was allowed by the censor to
stand.

(tbid.,5L87)
Let us summarize. What an audience may have heard at"the Curtain theatre and what some of them could read for themselves in print at a later date are entirely different things. Gone in the quarto was any reference to Richard, for it was said that Elizabeth could not tolerate any reference to her "weak'predecessor; gone the echo of his ioke, in the play already written about him, to his disgruntled nobles, that he did not fancy himself enough of

Obviously, none of this can be said to prove crown censorship. Over and above the routine need of actors to shorten their script f'or production purposes, there is always the alternate possibility of self-censorship,s steps taken by their officers to preclude any unnecessary trouble if and when they released a play to be set up in print, the rule being that what escapes notice on the boards may well not do so in print. (I shall return to the suggestion in connection with a disputed passage in Richaril II. ) From rehearsal to compositor's "copy," we are at liberty to imagine a succession of small acts of censorship that we can hardly expect to know anything about. At least, in the present instance, the reader is in possession of all the facts. He knows as much as anyone is likely to lnow. He will have to base his surmises on the

kind of cutting he believes is involved. Cutting that removes possibly objectionable matter, while remaining faithful to the general drift of the text, is different entirely from that which neuters, conceals, or actually perverts its thoughts. The latter are rightly to be considered mutilation" The deletion of the long abdication scene in the ftrst quartos of Richaril I/, for example, provides small ground for positing oficial censorship. The play required the crown to change hands at some point, and the possibly objectionable feature of the scene-that the restraint of Bolingbroke is made to appear almost magnanimous by contrast with the histrionics of Richard-seems a thing more likely to catch the literary eye than the bureaucratic. The possibility is worth entertaining that the deletion represents voluntary censorship and that it was the failure of oficialdom to give proper credit to just such gestures

The parcels and particulars of our grief,The which hath been with scorn shovld from the

. " . IsentyourGrace court,(IV, ii,35-37)

It is because Shakespeare wrote none. The point he had been maklng was suficiently clear, or would have been with the aid of the excised lines. Unhappily, it is iust as clear without them-I mean,

from the point of view of the crown. The orthodoxy which so many believe Shakespeare to typify may safely rest its case. Like the hostile witness it is shown to be, rebellion is seen largely through crown speeches that dwell on the singularity of an Archbishop's appearance on the field of Mars in armor-in the words
of Westmorelandr

of cooperation that in turn caused a playwright to reexamine his obligations as a wearer of the household livery. "Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour/Lose all and more by p"yiog too much rentP In the remaining scenes devoted to the rebels in the interval before their defeat, the Arehbishop is allowed another dozen lines of explanation to Prince ]ohn himself, very son of *God's substitute," as the latter appropriately refers to his father. If now there is no answer forthcoming to the rebel complaint:
10

Turning your books to greaves, your ink to blood, Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine To a loud trumpet and a point of war? Ubid.,50_b2)
Or,
as

John of Lancaster willhave

it:
(IV, ii,10)

Turning the word to sword and life to death.

of an author who has found him"self mistaken in"an assymption that his sovereign, or the people who represent her in the machineryof govern1u"t, **ry of ..dainty ;;J;;fi;"lTu^ ing grievances" and can be molliffed by proofs of'the
response terest held up before them?

S.oo1 elou-Sh will Joha brother of the prince of Wales, demon_ strate the better use he can ffnd for sacred *Wold- in everyday diplornacy. It is a use that appears to have earned him or friJ Uf.t no discredit, in Tudor time# and unfortunately has not arways / earned it for him in our own-at least in literary li."l"r. . We now have our-groundwork for examining, both in detail and in pervasive tone, the history play next on the boards, Henru V. The question remains as_befbr-e: What might be the f""iirrgr'""a

Merry Wiaes of Winilsor1s traditionally supposed to have been. What sort of command performance is it that can ffnd no middle ground between, on the one hand, the legitimate splendors of Choruses and a Crispin speech and, on the other, all the nearcomic business of throat-cutting and virgin-threatening? Surely, there was no need for the playwright to abandon the safe ground of a rousing play in the mode of The Fonnus Yictories of Henry

the Fifth or of Michael Drayton's ballad of Agincourt for

bloodthirsty iingoism that could conceivably have ofiended think-

"o**ol'io-

lng persons then as much as it does now. Some of his audience, too, would have known that this iingoism was not inherited from nny of their author's sources, least of all from Raphael Holinshed,
lris chief source.

io the rest of the world. Not to write a Henry V after the other plavs would, he wrote, be in the nature of a Jscanda\,' yet th";;; T:d- T"jlltty y?r articte ctearty ..not'for "t in ll_T", short-though Tillyard does not say this_I/enrqV may "*port.; ierv well have been in its way as much of a commat d performan ce is The

Shakespearet predicament as a writer of popular historv nlavs about-his country's unhappy past has been -de^scribed by oi" as well as by Professor lillyard. With Henry "J had the iime % come, he wrote,6 to demonstrate to the world i Uig" the glorious results of English unity; yet the means whereby.i* been achieved were not of a kind to be of ,rrrr"h iot"rurt "rit/i"J

believe, travestytravesty strictly deffned as disguise or change of garb. It is travcsty that is responsible for the mixture of private paciftcism and lnstitutional belligerence that so characterizes the play' In resorting to it, Shakespeare did no more than nearly all the wits rund journeymen of his day who found themselves with something The answer to the puzzle of Henry V is,
rrnpalatable or peculiarly private to say. Assumed heartiness, or the opposite-assumed deference--laborate pretenses of punctilious scholarship, burlesqued roles, mock attitudes of endless variety, these were the stock-in-trade of the self-conscious writer living in an age of such expected conformity. With his social role

I2

far from clariffed in any case, and the more so if he wrote for popular audience, he had good reason to think of himself politically suspect. I am aware that a volume of statistics shou accompany the suggestion, but lhazard the thought neverthelr that to writers of this stamp, circumvention of authority must ha appeared part of the business of being an author-the adr of a pose constituting a sort of insurance" There is a risk of simplifying matters. I am well awar that there were other thorities, too, to challenge the self-made author or the unattac one. There were university, Church, antiquity, the full weight the Middle Ages; and, of course, there is an explanation that cu across all others, the particular self-consciousness of a
nationhood.

In little room conffning mightY men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory'
Tho "bending' author of these lines is not disposed to give himlelf credit fJr five magniffcent Choruses, supplyilg more epic qrundeur to his theme iiran could any quantity of drums, culve-r-

fnr, attd marching men. If there is a fatal mlnglir-Ig,- it can only iuperficially be lJia to the episodic_nature.of the whole. The fault nearest llo's d""p"t. As we read in Sonnet !24, it is well for one's where: accident," from far end dea'rest work to be'builded

It sufiers not in smiling

Shakespeare eternally speaks for the individual; his mightiest political line is his "mutual render, only me for thee." That the experience of writing Henry V, and perhaps 2 Henry IV, was in some manner a disquieting one for him I take to be suggested bythe fact that of all his plays these two alone contain statemenfs that it is generally thought represent the author speaking out in, his own peruon. Both take the form of epilogues, and both aro apologies. Here are the opening lines of the epilogue of Henry Vt

Under the blow of thralled discontent, Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls: It fears not PolicY, that heretic, Which *ori, on l"ut"t of short-number'd hours

Pomp, nor falls

'''

is not the division into ffve sweePthe general untidiness of those epibut lng episodes thai is at fault :oies^. There is no imaginative overview-except as supplied by the Choruses. Perhapslt deserves the title "Fortune's bastard,"

tle markslf improvisation. It

Llke Merry wiaes, Henry

is a child of state, bearing too clearly

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursu'd the story;
74:

though a little more grandly than MerryWioes' Pr6hminaries past, we are to see how Shakesp-"-"tu-:"i alout, "killing" the thing end set about dJliberately, in his last chronicle
15

by a comie Welshman for "killing" Falstafi when a playwright was already doing-or had done-as much under royal injunction. I am referring once again to the weary farce Merry Wioes and to the tradition that it was completed in fourteen days at the queen's bequest, "to show Falstafi in Love." Be that as it may, a far greater crime was the killing of Prince Hal by turning him into Harry Monmouth. In the scene alluded to, Fluellan is speaking of his king, but he might as well have been speaking of Elizabeth, equally proud of her Welsh descent and of her great forbear. 'Alexander the pig" may indeed have killed "his pest friend Cleitus" "in his rages, and
his furies, and his wraths, and his cholers, and his moods, and his displeasures, and his indignations, and also being a little intoxicates in his prains." But the contemporary of Shakespeare might ask were Elizabeth and her ministers in any better or sounder mind when they . . . But hail to "the leek upon St. Tavy's Dayl" As Fluellan says, "there is ffgures in all things," and the Tudor

he loved, burying under a grotesque disguise the vision that had been taking shape of an ideal monarch, bold, warm, humorous and, withal, wise. What the feelings were that accompanied this profanation, whether they were anger, or pique, sdrrow, or mocking compliance each will decide for himself.G "sardonic" certainly suits the mood that sees fft to have Harry Monmouth exonerated

ancient lineage. We who have so often seen Shakespeare savoring his fondness for Plutarch may not have noticed that on this occasion he was also making a commentary on killing, We shall return to this passage further on. The capacity for self-immolation varies with individuals, though wo rather expect that our greatest writers will discharge it through their ffctional creations in some more constructive way than driving them mad or killing them off. On this occasion I do not propose to sit in judgment.

. . . on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
(Sonnet 121)
Shakespeare was well aware of the propensity-not eounting myself among those who hold that no part of any sonnet mny be considered autobiographical. Seeing him sacriffce his Hal lu a bumpkin love scene with a French princess, I suggest that we ruefully-write it down as a kjnd of testimony, perhaps the strong: est kind of testimony, to the strength of an unrealized ideal. Whatever he did, he chose to do because that was the way he wns. The times favored such behavioral extremes, and he had tho provocation, We shall next examine in greater detail the exlont of the provocation. 77

I believe that

habit of beheading, banishing, and imprisoning may have an

li
iri

i!
i.
ir
ai;

JFofas

to Cha.pter

il i:
,i

2t P. 6. Walter Wilson Greg's conclusion, after a review fV "censorship theory"-that it all '1ooks very -( mare's-nest" (The Shnkespeare First Folfo, New York, University Press, rg55, pp. z7g-e.75)-*"y have resulted from
the z Henry

,,, l:
ir,

fuurne, Melbourne University press, rg34). Hart reached his coo*lu.:t:tr by a numerical count'of tf." in Shakespeare,s . of_ the Tudol doctrine of "nri'-;"nces piisive obedience thJt very , :I9"gr -his had been instilled in him in youth. The count being Fuly" .,,{bund to exceed that of any other Eliza'bethan dramatist (ibid:, p-p. n-76), it followed that he sulpassed them all in orthodory. He must have been a royalist p"t u*Llluoce. Hartt essay has had -',an incalculable effect or, glrr"rution of scholars. yet in the e " efiort to reconcile the diserepant facts H^uyA fV issue,_it makes no of the playwright's supposed ofhodoxy and his incautio'n ia penoin.g ,, T"tt"j "expressed 9r impligd, subversive of . . . basic frinciples'and-suficient to , lrinq'lhe whole system of Tudor dJspotism crumbling into ruins" 6bid.,pp. 2o7, zo8). Hart himself dies not make the astounding inference that shakespeare condoned the ' censor's deletions and perhaps considered his play improved by them, but on the otheihand- he does trot speciiffcally ixclude it. ' The matter is not of trivial importance if we"accept t{e opinion of , textual critics who believe_rto, Henry fV is 6ne of &re plays 1Shakespeare saw to press himself. See Leo Kirschbaum, Shate. speme and'the stationerc (columbus, ohio state university press, 1955), pp. 165-168, for a summary of arguments for believing the ffrst quarto to have been set up from the author,s o*o, ,roi thu
comPany, coPy. 63

P. 5. Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilias (Mel_

having concentrated exclusively on the "Richard'excisions ( Note z9 for a conjecture about the latter). The excised that ffrst interested me, the rebels' speecbes, he dismissei as questionably long-winded"'-in other words, good candidates the actors'own deleting. Technical arguments about the pt bility of there being mislaid in the print shop a sheet conta Act III, Scene i (|. H. Smith, Shakespeare Quarterlg, XV h L71-ryg), should not, of course, influence our feelings about o problematical scenes, for example, Act IV, Scene i, which are

3: P. 9. It has probably been remarked before that the biguity with which the tumcoat Stanley is treated n Richard I may reflect the circumstance that his most recent descendant patron of the company for whom Shakespeare was then writin .F/ls father in turn had been Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire one of the commissioners who had tried Mary of Scotland ( Note zg). In Richard III, Stanley was not accorded the mental role given him by history in the victory of Eliza grandfather at Bosworth Field. 4z P.72. Paul Jorgensen, "The 'Dastardly Treachery' of princc

subiect to such conjecture.

f',fubn of Lancaster," PMLA, LXXVI (tg6t), demonstratet th* I' gro*itrg frequency of treacherous practices on both sides tn 'ii,dor warfaie. As usual with such historical research, Shukc'
$pflare emerges as no more than a "man of his times."
"

6: P,72. U. l,t. W. Tillyard, Shah,eryeards Histoty Pln'ys (Lon'

tlon, rg44), p. 3o5.

0: ?. ld. Arthur P. Rossiter sees behind all the histories "patlos, ilrrision, a sad wry smile, and a malicious grin . . . and all 'be' frrng'," "Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories," Talking of filmkespoare,_ed. John Garrett (London, 1954), P. 16o.

-.

SHAKBSPEARE ST]RVEY
23
r. CRITICAL
STUDIES
ag

rey;e*'ed 6y G. R. FIr

r ao

THE YEAR'S CONTRIBUTIANS TO SHAKESPEARIAN STUDY

Charles Barber's 'Prince Hal, Henry V, and the Tudor Monarchy'z relates the plays

court; and Robert L. Kell)'6 asserts that the King's condemnation of his'bedfellow' shows his political insrght and maturity, since the
record of the entire Scroop family, as depicted in Richard II and Henry IYris a tr@cherous one. The dispute about the play and about the character ofthe King is, ofcourse, an old one. Taking note of this fact, C. H. Hobdan in his 'lmagery and Irony in Henry V'r7 comes to the reasonable conclusion that the division

dealing

with the Prince to the conflict of

medieval and capitalist values that was emergiog during Qgeen Elizabeth's later years.
He holds that Hal, like Elizabeth, tries to strike

balance between old-fashioned chivalry

the Tudor monarchy. Elsa Sjoberg is also interested in the continuity of these plays. Her essay, 'From Madcap Prince to King: The Evolution of Prince Hal'rr i" designed to demonsrate that any change in the Prince is merely outward. His inner purpose remains constant, and he always knows how to act
when the time for action comes. It is precisely this idea that Thomas H. Jameson cannot tolerate. Vigorously rebutting all suggestions

(Hotspur) and new rynicism (Falstaff). Henry Zhe takes to be an uncritical glorification of

among critics corresponds

to a division in

Shakespeare's own mind. Called on to present

Henry as a hero, he took refuge, Hobday thinks, in irony, iuxtaposing honour and religionvith greed and cruelty.

that the Prince of lrenry IV shows any for Machiavellianism, he finds it impossible to reconcile this figure with the bellicose patriotic king of Henry V. The
proclivities
solution for this dilemma which he proposes in The Hidden Shakespearea is that Henry 17 is not the play that Shakespeare would have written had he been left to his own devices. It is, instead, his response to the censorship that was being exercised around ry99. He writes a'safe' play, at least on dre surface, but his treatment of his subiect, making it a ravesty of what it should have been, expresses his contempt for the received ideas of the time. The Shakespeare presented in this lively, though somewhat erratic book, is a subversive artist engaged, to

quote part of the sub-title, in 'Undercover Activiry in the Theatre'. Marilyn L. VilliamsorL on the other hand, thinks that 'The Episode with Villiams in Henry Z'5 seryes as a reminder, particularly in the way that it en ra Sat something of the rvild prince of ntFlr$.aF sill srrvives in the King at Agin-